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Cultivating Effective Brokers: A Party Leader’s Dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2015

Edwin Camp
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Abstract

Political machines dominate many electoral democracies. Scholars argue that local party members, commonly called brokers, are crucial to the success of machines. This article enhances our understanding of party machines by developing a formal model that reveals how leaders extract services from brokers. The model also shows that leaders of machines face a dilemma: they need effective brokers, but these brokers create vulnerabilities that can ultimately reduce the party’s vote share and even cause electoral loss. So, in addition to highlighting electoral strengths of political machines, this article reveals their organizational vulnerabilities. This argument is evaluated with a novel survey experiment from Argentina. The survey is the first to draw upon a probability sample of brokers in any country.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Supplement 3 , July 2017 , pp. 521 - 543
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Vanderbilt University Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (email: [email protected]). For excellent comments and suggestions, the author thanks the Editor Réne Lindstädt, and the three anonymous reviewers, as well as Jennifer Bussell, Luis Cecchi, Ignacio Cesar, Seok-Ju Cho, Thad Dunning, Pablo Fernandez-Vazquez, Justin Fox, Brian Fried, Federico Fuchs, Brenton Kenkel, Gregory Koger, Joel Middleton, Victoria Paniagua, Ignacio Puente, John Roemer, Michael Sances, Luis Schiumerini, Jason Sorens, Susan Stokes, Andres Vargas, Lee Walker, and seminar participants at Yale and Vanderbilt. He acknowledges support from the MacMillan Center. Data replication sets are available at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123415000411.

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